Handwriting

Last week, I posted an entry about Pens and Pencils. That naturally leads to this topic; handwriting.  And, by handwriting, I mean cursive hand writing.

 Sergeant George Camblair writing letter home from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during World War Two.

When I was a kid a great deal of time was spent learning "cursive writing" via the Palmer Method.  The Palmer Method, the way we were taught it, featured writing books in which the student practiced writing the loopy flowing lines of English script.  Up on the borders of the classrooms, where the walls joined the ceilings, many class rooms had examples of Palmer Method script up near the ceiling, running along the entire border of the wall/ceiling junction.  Pre-printed Palmer Method wall paper supplied the example.  Teachers, for their part, had a means by which they could put the same lines we found in our work books up on the black (or green) boards to help provide examples to us on who to write it.

That would have been in the 1970s.  I'm not sure what grade were first introduced to cursive script, but we were practicing it, if my recollection is correct, by 3d or 4th Grade.  For many of us, once we learned it, it stuck, and we still write with it.  In that fashion, we were like our parents.

Both of my parents had beautiful examples of handwriting, with my father's being particularly nice and legible.  While he could type (and my mother normally typed, even if she was writing short items) when he wrote letters or notes, he normally wrote them in script.  His script was amazingly legible, with there never being any guess as to what he was writing.

 This is not to say, of course, that everyone's script, back in that era, was equally legible.  In fact, quite the opposite is the true.  I've seen many examples of handwriting from the 1950s and earlier that was nearly completely illegible.  Perhaps the most surprising thing of all, regarding legibility, is that some official documents, almost certainly written by scriveners, are darned near illegible.

A scrivener  is an occupation that has ceased to exist; the occupation being the victim of technology. The technology, in this case, was the typewriter.  The typewriter was invented in the 1860s and had a very rapid spread.  It wiped out scriveners as an occupation and rendered the word itself so obscure that generations of high school students have had to have the term explained them when assigned to read Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Now, the term seems to show up solely in court decisions when a court wants to use a fancy word for "drafter".  So, instead of a person being the "drafter of a contract," they are the "scrivener."  Oddly, this is actually an incorrect use of the term, as a scrivener is not the drafter.

Typewriters belonging to RKO being turned over to the U.S. Government during World War Two to help ease the critical shortage of typewriters.

A person would be inclined to think that scriveners must have had beautiful handwriting, but it simply isn't the case.  I've read more than one official document that was set out in perfectly awful handwriting.  Some U.S. land patents, for example, are darned near impossible to read.  The scriveners, who perhaps were actually occupants of other occupations, had hideous handwriting.  Indeed, at least by my observations, early land patents are difficult to read, due to the handwriting, more often than not. And bad handwriting shows up in lots of other official documentation as well.

British soldiers in North Africa writing home.  Note the fountain pen.

Still, I miss cursive writing and really feel it should still be taught.  At some point schools just stopped teaching it.  I'm not sure why, but now at least one or two entire generations of Americans can barely write in cursive, if they can at all.  My son, for example, started off writing with it and was affirmatively stopped from doing it as school, meaning that instead he was taught to print everything.  Printing is slow, and frankly a person with bad cursive hand writing will usually have equally bad printing, so nothing is achieved by the omission.  And cursive is much more rapid to write.

On that latter point, that may perhaps explain the demise of cursive writing.  Just as the typewriter eliminated the scrivener, the computer may have eliminated cursive writing.  Now, younger people take some sort of a computer,. whether it be a true computer, or a miniature computer such as smart phones have, and are, with them everywhere.  Most younger people are capable of keyboarding extraordinary rapidly, and the modern thought is, no doubt, that they learn to write rapidly that way.

But, even in this day and age, there are times when  you need to take notes, or write.  Cursive writing was quickly, and somehow more charming, for that.  I miss it.